Saying Goodbye to the World (Tree)

This weekend I did it. I sat down on Saturday for what must have been 14 hours and I knit the last side and a quarter of Yggdrasil. My shoulders are sore and my back's kind of angry at me. I thought maybe I could soak it in my green bucket, but it took a glance to realize that I was going to need to scrub the tub.

And it needed the whole tub.

I pinned it out after about an hour and a half (lanolin is tough stuff on the water-repelling front) and let it dry. Actually, first I had to move all our large furniture because the blanket is about 6 feet square. Less than 24 hours later, I'm snuggling in the world tree.

 If I block it again in the near future, I'll be a little less aggressive. It looks fine but it's a little... lofty?... for a blanket. So, what did I change, what did I do wrong (bahaha) and what's wrong in the pattern?

Well, in the leaf border, all the increases are m1s. I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the vine-y bits, so I used "lift 1" from the outside edge. The effect is really quite nice. I did use a m1 for all the purl increases.

There's a small-ish error in row 51 of the leaf braid corner chart--it's a miscrossed cable, but by this point you probably won't even see it since you've knit the darn leaf braid about 70 times. There's some weirdness back in the wide cable chart, but I don't remember what it was and I kind of threw away that sheet of paper because I was so happy to be finished with that section.

I screwed up the increases in the central panel... somehow... I'm still not really sure what went wrong even as I look at it. Probably a shift for 3 rows and just 3 rows or something crazy like that. It's the top left corner. So strange. A lot of folks have said that they hate the way the increases look. I don't really mind them, but if they really do annoy you there are a few solutions. Properly pairing right and left m1s (rather than using just m1 right) will get you a long way--it'll even out and thin down the line. During the field of reverse stockinette in the center panel, kfb would probably look just fine. And since I'm currently partial to lifting stitches, you could do that anywhere, but there would be some concern with holes .

So now I'm knitting a hat. A small hat on large needles. A quickly accomplished project for a recent graduate moving to colder climes. Then it's back to all those Works In Progress that have been anything but in progress. Maybe we'll finish Les Mis before we hang out with Wakame again, but I really can't say one way or the other.

I'm just happy to have the world tree off my needles and in my lap.